The present invention relates to object storage usage and management, and more particularly, to managing import of data to, export of data from, and copy of data within a tiered object storage environment.
A tiered object storage system, such as a public object store, is often used in cloud storage solutions where large quantities of data are to be stored for access from multiple different nodes or servers. In cloud storage solutions, there may be several different performance tiers that are offered to different customers and/or users, often with corresponding price increases for use of higher performance storage infrastructure.
However, when data is to be migrated between different tiers of a tiered object storage, issues may arise as to how to handle such data migration when the data is moved between object stores with different performance characteristics, which may demand different pricing for the customer/user, in a seamless, fully integrated manner. Although data migration or tiering within a single name space is provided in some conventional solutions, no such solution exists for tiering between different name spaces. The issues that occur include how to keep track of locations of the data transparently to an accessing application, how to move the data between object storage tiers and track the movement, and how to scale any solution across a cloud storage solution for use by all customers/users.